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The Last Trip
Valerie walked solemnly among the headstones, on her annual pilgrimage to the grave site of one of her students. It was a bitter January morning, and everything was frosted over. Young saplings that had been planted that past spring were now encased in glassy ice exoskeletons, which glinted even under the heavy cloud cover. They looked like they would shatter to pieces as heavy gusts rocked the landscape. For Valerie, the miserable conditions served as a form of penance. She walked past rows and rows of graves until she saw the one she was looking for. She'd been coming here for almost 25 years now and barely even needed to put conscious thought into her navigation of the cemetery anymore. Indeed, she was almost startled to find herself having arrived at her destination, as if she had been sleepwalking, drawn by an unseen force to the spot. She could always recognize the grave by the wreath, always having turned brown since her last annual visit. She picked up the old wreath and replaced it with her new offering. The gravestone was small, basically a glorified plaque really. Even in the winter the grass threatened to obscure it from view. Valerie's father was an inventor of sorts, which she always credited for her passion for teaching. He was always in his lab, tinkering and sketching and testing and retesting and getting frustrated and almost giving up before finding within himself just enough strength to keep going. He was not a conventional inventor. His inventions were truly unique, as were his methods. He was shunned by other engineers and scientists for his eccentricity, and was a habitual recluse. However, he wanted to pass on his gift to his daughter, and often had her help out in the lab. Among his other projects, Valerie's father was working on a time machine, which consumed the bulk of his time. However, it wasn't to be just a time machine. The machine would also be an aircraft, spacecraft, submarine; it could change its mass and volume and self-configure into any shape it needed to be. "Go on, don't be such a scardy-cat," she thought back to the student's last moments. "Try petting him," one of the other students had said, the grizzly figure looming tall over the student. Valerie shuddered and gritted her teeth. That memory had not stopped intruding on her daily life ever since the event. Valerie was a quick learner. She helped her father with building the machine into her teen years. Her father warned her to keep the project a secret. It wasn't that he was afraid of people stealing profits from his inventions. Rather, he explained that mankind was not and probably would never be ready for such technology. Mankind's perverse pursuit of science had given him the atomic bomb, gas chambers, and all manner of inflicting death and suffering on one another. Giving them such godlike power as he was developing would be their undoing. He told Valerie that should he die before the project was completed, or in any case after he died, she should find a way to use the technology without making it public knowledge. She must never, ever let the military or government of any country get their hands on it. Valerie learned that her father was indeed not just a scientist in the traditional sense. He, and she, hailed from a long line of inventors with a special gift. That gift was, for lack of a better term, alchemy. Valerie had indeed already discovered some of her power as a little girl. She could heal sick animals, and cause her toys and dolls to do things they couldn't normally do. The alchemist's code bade her family to keep their gifts secret. Her father made his income as a software engineer, but the gift of alchemy allowed him to create his inventions without too much expense. It was impossible, he said, for people to create a time machine, let alone what he was working on, using normal science. The laws of the universe were quite deterministic, and God would not give them too much leeway to break them. Inventions like his must belong only to the most virtuous and selfless. The machine's properties of self-configuration were emerging by the time Valerie was in college, pursuing a double major in education and chemical engineering. Being a prodigy as she was, she could have had a future as an executive of a major company like Lockheed Martin, but in her heart she knew she always wanted to be a teacher. She still helped her father with the project during her semester breaks. As she was completing her doctorate, they began testing the machine's vehicular properties. They took it to the moon, and to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They shrank it to the size of an acorn and used it to explore a small pond, and then later an ant colony. Her father died of exhaustion before the time-travel technology was finished. She had to complete it on her own. This was difficult without her father. She could understand his plans well enough, but lacked his experience in both engineering and alchemy. First she tried flying the machine into orbit and racing it at light speed to reverse time. This proved fruitless, because it was the type of approach a traditional scientist would take. She would have to lean heavily on her family's special gift. Alchemy was more than just using magic to create technology. It was, in its essence, a process of creating life itself within inanimate objects. The machine was indeed alive, and theoretically already had all the technology it needed to be able to traverse time, but something was holding it back. She realized she had to learn to communicate with the machine, to ask it to do what she wanted. Once this was achieved, they traveled time. The bus took her to the high middle ages of Europe, and to the colonial age of the Americas. She avoided using it to travel time too often, knowing there were risks. By now Valerie was an elementary school teacher, and she had decided on how she would use the machine. She would use it to give her students her father's gift of enlightenment, to take them to places none of their peers could go, and give them new insights on the world. She made the machine into a bus, just an ordinary yellow school bus to take her students on field trips. The school administration always thought it was strange that she chose to use her own private school bus, but there was no specific rule against it and she had the appropriate license, so they allowed it. Little did they know that the bus had a beating heart of its own. Their first field trip was around the solar system. She had already done the trip with just herself and the bus in order to make sure it could be done safely. During the field trip, there was an incident on Pluto that should have served as a warning that she was playing with fire, but they all made it back safely. They always made it back safely. Until they didn't. The parents never believed their kids about the kinds of field trips she took them on, and neither did their peers at the school. At first, they were mocked by other students, and the other teachers assumed they just had overactive imaginations. But they told their stories with such conviction that eventually they were admired for it. They were kids who truly believed anything was possible, and their bright outlook was contagious. Before long every student was dreaming of the kind of wild adventures Valerie's students enjoyed. She took them to the Jurassic era, and to the depths of the ocean. Here again, they ran into trouble, but it was managed as usual. Then Valerie had an awful, terrible idea. What if...she could use the bus to take her students into the future? It had been something she had not dared to attempt before, but her past trips with her students had made her confident that the bus could handle it. She had intended to transport them all 800 years forward, but something went wrong, and they ended up 800 thousand years into the future. Valerie immediately knew she had made a mistake when she saw how the Earth was going to be. She and her students could never unsee the ruined city and the blackened sky. There was rubble where their school had been. She hadn't expected their school to still be there even 800 years into the future, but the rubble went on for infinite miles in every direction. It wasn't the future of flying cars and robots she had hoped for, but she reluctantly led the kids out of the bus. She went first to make sure the air was safe to breathe. Once they had exited the bus, she had an immediate feeling of encroaching terror. Without explanation, she told her students to go back into the bus. Just as the last student was about to board, a creature came up behind him. It was a large, hairy, apelike beast, taller than the bus itself, but the most terrifying aspect was its familiarity. Valerie knew this was what homo sapiens would become. The other students were fascinated, and encouraged their peer to interact with the being, but Valerie saw that it had death in its eyes as it loomed over the helpless student. Before she could scream at the student to get inside the bus, it had disemboweled the boy, spraying blood all over the bus windows. As the students screamed, Valerie had no choice but to shut the door, but not before the creature had flung one of the student's bloody arms inside. The students were virtually catatonic when they had made it back to their own time. They didn't speak when their parents came to pick them up. She had to show them. There was no other way. She had to show the parents, the principal, the school board, and the psychiatrists the bus's magical, terrible power. It was the only way the could understand. After the bus's properties were demonstrated, they all agreed on a cover story that the student had been in a terrible accident. The dead boy's parents had the arm cremated. Valerie turned around and walked back up the slope through the cemetery. By now it was starting to rain. She got inside the bus and drove off. Before the student's urn was buried, she had tearfully asked his parents for a favor. They were confused at first, but allowed her to do it once they understood her intentions. She had taken the urn on the bus, and drove it to the natural history museum. She took a vial of the ashes and stashed it in her purse before entering and going on a guided tour. The boy had always wanted a normal field trip, and this was the closest thing she could offer now. 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